| Habitat fragmentation is one of the greatest threats to biodiversity globally. Boreal forests in Sweden and Finland make no exception to this pattern, the remaining old-growth forests have been scattered into small fragments within a heavily managed landscape. During the last decades, changes to legislation and certification demands have resulted in modifications of forest management practices to better fulfill environmental goals. Green infrastructure, i.e. strategically planned network of natural and seminatural areas, can improve connectivity between habitat patches and provide very important large core areas for biodiversity in the managed landscape. As a part of their environmental policy, Sveaskog has established 37 so called Ecoparks across Sweden, covering 175 000 ha of forest land, to serve as landscapes of green infrastructure. At least fifty percent of the productive area of each Ecopark is set aside for nature conservation, and managed for increasing or protecting nature values by restorative treatments (creation of deadwood, burning and increasing the proportion of deciduous component in the landscape) and free development. However, despite the considerable cost and effort related to establishment of the Ecoparks, their importance for biodiversity conservation has not been properly assessed.
Our aim is therefore to 1) assess the importance of Ecoparks as core areas for biodiversity of various taxa of deadwood-dependent organisms, including beetles, hymenopterans (bees, solitary bees, wasps and wood wasps) and wood-decaying fungi, 2) evaluate the importance of forest structure in the surrounding landscape at different spatial scales for biodiversity within the Ecoparks and 3) assess if the importance of Ecoparks for biodiversity management will change over time, resulting from the biodiversity management conducted over time within the Ecoparks.
We will utilize an on-going project called Effect 20 established by Sveaskog and WWF. Within the project, Sveaskog created sun-exposed high stumps in pairs of Ecoparks and reference landscapes, to collect deadwood-dependent insects with window traps during 2010-2013. This sampling will be repeated in 2020-2023. The proposed project will utilize the research infrastructure and data collected in Effect 20. The project is therefore very suitable as a PhD-project, as the PhD-student can first utilize existing data, consisting of over 130 000 beetle individuals and several thousands of hymenopterans identified to species, and secondly, the new data collected in 2019-2021. The student will utilize the newest and most accurate information of forest structure and silvicultural history and insect data collected by Sveaskog in 2020-2022, to quantify the multiple spatial scale and temporal effects of Ecoparks on biodiversity.
This project is well in line with the purpose of “Lammska stiftelsen” to support research on nature conservation in a landscape context, because the project will focus on saproxylic organism, a group of organism strongly disfavored by silviculture, and because our evaluation of the role of Ecoparks will be conducted in a landscape context.
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